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Tuesday, September 27, 2011

How NOT to Get Traffic to your Blog

If you are a new blogger and have a couple of posts online then there is a pretty good chance that your pageviews are not quite you expected them to be before undertaking the trouble of writing those great posts. Desperate for some free and easy traffic for your blog you decide to take advantage of that ever faithful monster called Google and in time your screen is littered with millions and millions of services and affiliates of services all of which promise to deliver tons of hits to your blog and the more you read the more you get convinced that they are too good to be true. Know why? Because they really are.!

Before you start misinterpreting me I must clarify that almost all the FREE services are 100% legit and will work just like their respective pitch pages promise. But what they tacitly skip mentioning is that you will only receive tons of traffic but hardly any TARGETED TRAFFIC (you can hardly hope to interest beyond a few seconds a person looking for gardening tips with your blog on automobiles!) and further you might lose some vital brownie points with Google.

So here are some of the very common types of traffic generating schemes that every blogger should avoid:

Automatic Traffic Exchange SitesAutomatic traffic exchange sites works on the simple principle that for every site you view using their system another member of their system will visit your site a specific (usually .5 or .75) number of times. They are free (though premiere membership is also available) and require minimum effort on your part as all you need to do is keep a window open and the sites will rotate automatically, changing every 30 seconds or so. And the really big traffic exchange sites (like autosurfpro) can easily generate 400+ PVs for your site on a daily basis.Even so, some of the reasons you don't want to use this apparent godsend of a service are:

Since it is fully automatic there is no guarantee that your page is actually getting viewed. Someone may just keep the window open and minimized and be watching a movie for all you know.

Your onsite time is typically very small (10-30 seconds) and often your page won't load properly in that time.

Since your page will automatically rotate it will register an incredibly high bounce rate (most likely 100%) and this will prompt Google into thinking that your site is of very poor quality and that is why all your visitor are clicking out in such a hurry.

Additionally, Google positively HATES automatic traffic exchangers and while you cannot use it with Blogger, you might even run into trouble if you try to use it on pages with Adsense ad units.

Viral Traffic Sites

As the name suggests, viral traffic sites helps your traffic grow virally. Basically everytime a person in your downline refers a new person to the viral traffic site he has to view your page before being allowed to sign up. Sounds easy? Here's why you still shouldn't waste you time on viral traffic sites:

It is a lot more difficult than it sounds to actually build yourself a sufficiently large downline to actually generate sufficient amount of traffic on a regular basis.If you are not getting any traffic where will you find the people to persuade to sign up under you and join your downline?

The persons who are actually viewing your sites are being FORCED to do so and in their eagerness to get a part of the action are hardly likely to show much enthusiasm in your site.

Free Backlink Exchange Sites and Directories

Though not as direct as the above two methods, backlink exchange directories list your site on their high pagerank pages and provide you with dofollow backlinks which is supposed to boost your search engine visibility and help you to get more visitors from Google. So why not to use it? Here are just some of the answers:

First and foremost they DON'T work! The backlinks are hardly ever one-way (you will also be required to link back to them) and will almost never be CONTEXTUAL, and it is commonly acknowledged that if anything Google frowns upon link lists and definitely doesn't give much impotance to them.

Backlink directories have a habit of cheating on you and there is a very good chance that the link to your site will disappear within a week and possibly before Google has even had time to spider it.

Now that you know how not to get traffic to your blog put your fingers to your keyboard and keep churning out some more great articles (which is the key to success in the long run) and check out my next post where I tell how yo can get easy, free and targeted traffic to your page.